I finished up le Carré’s Call for the Dead from last week, which quite satisfactorily tied up all loose ends. One thing that shouted to me is the way that, whatever their “actual” views, neither le Carré nor his avatar George Smiley could get away from the following fact: putting aside the serious flaws of the Soviet Union and its historic assay toward Socialism, those on its side fought for civilisation and a futuristic vision for Humanity whereas the Western cold warriors fought for pride and the preservation of barbarism:
Dieter had remembered and Smiley had not. They had come from different hemispheres of the night, from different worlds of thought and conduct. Dieter, mercurial, absolute, had fought to build a civilization. Smiley, rationalistic, protective, had fought to prevent him. ‘Oh God,’ said Smiley aloud, ‘who was then the gentleman …?’
Following Call for the Dead, I did make a quickly aborted attempt to read the sequel, A Murder of Quality, but I decided to hold off on that until I am more in the right mindset for it. I found I was more in the mood for an easy science fiction read, so I picked up Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Saturation Point. It was indeed an easy read, but I can’t say I enjoyed it very much. It seemed to lack the care and delicacy of Tchaikovsky’s other works that I have read, and even compared to Alien Clay (a similar but better page-turner), I found Saturation Point a bit clumsy. Although written in 2024, it reads like a pandemic-era fever dream that hit all the right notes to resonate with the most extremely unhinged element—the person we all know who talked inecessantly about being “in quarantine” because they were in their house at liberty eating Deliveroo every day, and for whom five years later there is still no conversation that does not eventually return to their doubtful “extremely long covid” symptoms. All this I would give license for (it’s fiction, after all!), but the plot was full of holes and elements far more implausible than the “Hygrometric Dehabitation Region” (which is, on the face of it, not so hard to imagine given our disastrous environmental trajectory).
After this, I realised I wanted to read something with a bit more literary substance, so I started Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed which has long been on my list. Like everything of Le Guin that I have read, this one is beautifully written and full of grace and depth and creativity. I have always wanted to write fiction, and if I could be like any author, it would be Le Guin. I will reserve any further comment on the actual content of the book until after I have finished it.